As an avowed atheist living among a sea of believers (both locally and on the Internet), I have spent a lot of time discussing my beliefs (or lack thereof, as the case may be). The purpose of this blog is not to prove the non-existence of God or "de-convert" anybody from their faith, but simply to preserve some of these discussions and allow me to flesh them out through the process of writing them down, as well as to share them with anybody who might be interested in reading them.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

No, All Theists Do Not Worship the Same God

Despite
the fact that there are many thousands of different religions and sects
within those religions, each with their own unique take on what,
exactly, “God” is and how He acts (or what, exactly, “gods” are and how
they act, for the various polytheistic religions out there), time and
again I keep seeing people claim that “it’s all the same God” or that
“all theists worship the same God, even if they call Him by a different
name.”

Now, growing up as a Christian (a member
of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and being taught
that the Bible was literally true, this claim was pretty much required
in order for the religion as a whole to make any sort of sense. After
all, the Bible clearly talks about one God who create the Earth and
everything else, so there can’t possibly be any other gods out there.
And, since the Biblical timeline is supposed to trace back to the
beginning of human civilization, the only choice is to assume that every
other ancient religion (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian, etc.) was
actually somehow a corruption of this original true faith in the one God
of the Bible. Historical and archaeological evidence to the contrary be
damned, that’s our story and we’re sticking with it, since to do
otherwise would be to admit that other civilizations talked about
completely different “gods” long before the events in the Old Testament
(including the creation of the world) ever took place. OK, so while this
view is not actually supportable by evidence, I can understand why
people would cling to it.

A completely
different claim, however, is often made that the three so-called
“Abrahamic” religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all worship the
same God, despite the fact that most of the actual devout members of
each of those three religions would probably not agree with this claim.
All three religions, the argument goes, all have their roots in the Old
Testament, each one building upon that basic concept of God and
therefore all actually worshiping the same God when you get right down
to it. In fact, it is often said, the word “Allah” in Arabic simply
means “the God” and this is a reference to the God described in the
Bible.

Except… this really doesn’t make much
sense. Just because all three religions have a concept of God that can
be traced to the same root, the interpretations and extra information
added on by each religion is so great as to render the resulting concept
of God wholly unrecognizable from one religion to the next. Yes, both
Christians and Muslims claim to worship the God described in the Old
Testament, but they have changed the core definition of that God so much
as to produce an entirely different concept of God.

One big is example is the core Christian concept that Jesus Christ is divine (i.e.,
that Jesus is, in essense, an aspect of God). You can’t have
Christianity without Christ, and the fact of Jesus’s atoning sacrifice
is what evidences the divine mercy that is an essential part of God’s
very nature. Jews, however, will absolutely not accept that Jesus was
the literal son of God, let alone that he is actually an intrinsic part
of God. The Jewish concept of God simply will not allow God to have a
human component, and the idea of an atoning sacrifice to provide
salvation to humanity is a foreign concept. As soon as Christians took
the Jewish notion of God and added Jesus to that notion, it ceased to be
the same God. Similarly, the fact that Muslims do not accept Jesus as
divine (“just” another prophet) means that they do not actually worship
the same concept or description of God, regardless if they claim that
their belief derives from Biblical sources.

[Thought
experiment: Take a 2010 Honda Civic coupe. Chop the frame and add some
steel to lengthen it. Hack at the body and rework the pillars until you
can fit two more doors so it’s now a sedan. Remove the 4-cylinder
naturally aspirated gasoline engine and replace it a 6-cylnider
supercharged diesel engine. Convert it to all-wheel drive. And then
remove all the badges and replace them with ones that say “Smith
Motors.” Now, take this car and put it side-by-side with a brand new
2017 Honda Civic Coupe and try to justify claiming that they are
basically the same car. Sure, they can both trace their roots to the
same original model and style of car, but are they really still the
same?]

So, then, why do people keep
insisting that all Abrahamic faiths do, in fact, worship the same God?
Well, some of these folks are legitimate scholars of comparative
religions and are merely pointing out the historical fact that each
later religion claimed to be based on the previous ones. But
that’s not really the same thing as “worshiping the same God,” though,
is it? Or that each religion has the same understanding of God’s
essential nature? As far as I can tell, the answer is no, and that’s
because legitimate religious scholars (many of whom aren’t even
religious themselves) often don’t have an agenda or an axe to grind.

In
my experience, however, there is another group of people who make the
claim that all Abrahamic faiths worship the same God, however. These are
not serious, impartial religious scholars, but instead appear to be
deeply religious individuals, usually of the Christian or Islamic
persuasion. And their assertion that all Abrahamic faiths worship the
same God seems to be a direct response to the issue raised time and
again by atheists that, since there are so many different Gods worshiped
by so many different religions, the likelihood of any one God being the
true God is not very high. “It doesn’t matter that there are so many
different religions,” they will claim, “since they all basically worship
the same God.” And this appears to be nothing more than an attempt to
perpetuate the false “theist vs. atheist” dichotomy I explored in a
previous post:

As
long as these believers can argue that all theists are somehow
presenting a unified front when it comes to a belief in God, they can
ignore the vast differences among the various religious beliefs and
avoid needing to justify why their particular God concept is the only
one worth talking about or needing to defend their beliefs against, not
just atheists, but every other belief system that contradicts theirs.